Yesterday, I posted on excerpts from a new book by Richard Thompson Ford, The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse. This second excerpt starts with a consideration of the Jay-Z boycott of Cristal (champagne) for its owner’s “racist” comments.  In short, Cristal suggested that it didn’t like the fact that hip-hop artists were rapping about how much Cristal they could afford to drink.  Jay-Z said this was a racist suggestion.

Why, when black unemployment, poverty, rates of incarceration, and life expectancy remain severe and unaddressed problems, did anyone pay a moment’s attention to the offhand comment of the representative of a vintner with roots in prerevolutionary France? Jay-Z talked the line of a scrappy civil rights activist, but with the inflections of a jilted socialite: “Jay-Z … will now be serving only Krug and Dom Pérignon,” sniffed the press release. When a young, black, self-described “hustler” from Brooklyn seems as precious as a Park Avenue debutante, we’ve turned some sort of corner in race relations. But where are we headed?

Ford makes an important distinction here, and this is one of the central problems of racism: “[Cristal's] comments might have reflected racism-we don’t want blacks drinking our wine-but they might have reflected concern over the association of the brand with an ostentatious subculture that extols violence and crime.”  If this isn’t a good conversation starter, I don’t know what is.